My question is to the Premier.

Last week, the Minister of Health said that primary care physicians should treat more children so they do not have to go to emergency rooms. However, the reality is that 1.8 million Ontarians don’t have a regular family physician to even go to in these situations. OHIP-covered virtual care has been one of the last resorts that parents and their sick children have had to find immediate medical help, which this government is gutting, leaving parents with a cost of about $29 a month.

Our government is allowing for private ventures like KixCare to charge for virtual pediatric visits.

Dr. Aviva Lowe, a pediatrician who consulted on KixCare, is urging the provincial government to maintain access to virtual care. She said, “Pediatricians ... will no longer be able to offer virtual visits for patients”—and she went on to talk about how it’s unequal for people who don’t have family doctors.

My question is, at a time when there is a crisis, why is our government gutting essential services like OHIP-covered virtual care?

Lionel, a parent in Scarborough Southwest, reached out to our office about his recent experience. After getting sick, the only way his family was able to get medical advice and a prescription was through virtual service.

Our government is allowing for profit to be made from essential services like health care and fundamentally taking away the right of Ontarians to publicly funded primary care.

In a CBC article, Leah Littlepage, another Ontarian, talked about her 16-month-old daughter, who stayed out of the emergency room four times in the past year because of virtual care.

The system that you have come up with for virtual care is not working.

My question is, at a time when pediatric hospitals are overrun, especially for infants and babies, and we need to have virtual care service that actually covers these people, like these parents, why is this government taking away options that are available—that are available to save kids—

Thank you very much for the question.

We just want to take a moment to acknowledge the great work done by all of our doctors across Ontario, and we thank them for all of their efforts.

As members may recall, during the pandemic, we started to cover virtual care.

Before the last election, a three-year physician services agreement was ratified by the Ontario Medical Association and its members. It was a true milestone, because it was the first time in 10 years or so that a deal had been reached without an arbitrator. But it also realized another milestone: That agreement made virtual care a permanent feature of our health care system and our health care offering for the first time ever for patients. We’re very proud of that. Under the new framework, things have been changing and the way it’s compensated has been changing—but that is what the OMA ratified and what the members of the OMA agreed to.

As I was saying, under the new virtual care agreement, all medically necessary virtual care services, including patient visits by telephone, will continue to be insured under OHIP, but we’re implementing a new pricing structure for virtual care—and that’s what we’re really talking about here: a pricing issue—that ensures patients are receiving services through the avenue that best reflects a patient-physician relationship. Patients will continue to have access to virtual care where clinically appropriate—in settings, for example, like rural and remote mental health services.

Our government has been clear with virtual care—because this is what we heard from patients. It’s intended as a complement to in-person care—not a replacement. So we are making a requirement that a physician has to actually meet a patient once within a 24-month period. We don’t think that’s too much to ask. That provides for better patient care, which is what we want in Ontario.